In Stasis

At the edge of this so-called transition, I am terrified. They say the future lies in the virtual world, where lives are unburdened by hunger, waste, or breath. Clean, efficient, eternal. But when I look ahead, all I see is a void. My friends tell me Doctor has the answers I need—answers to the questions that claw at my mind late at night. But what do they know? My friends are nothing but shadows on a screen, gone the moment I log off. Where do they go? And when someone turns off my computer, where will I go?

The mandate leaves me no choice. Transition, or lose everything: education, work, community, even family. They say it’s better for the planet—no bodies consuming resources, no footprints to leave behind. A pristine world, waiting for us to return when the everything is over. But when will that be? Who will fix it? From where I stand, the Earth is still choking, and the only difference is the rows of glass sarcophagi holding bodies in stasis. They call it preservation. I call it forgetting.

Sometimes I wonder if the air I breathe is even real. What if this world—the dirt beneath my feet, the smog-streaked sky—is just another simulation? A transition within a transition. After all, no one ever wakes up. Or maybe they do, and the rest of us are just too far gone to notice.

I can’t stop wishing we could turn back. Back to when the world was alive. When laughter wasn’t a glitch in a speaker, when hands were warm and real, when the wind carried the scent of flowers instead of ash. I want to believe there’s a way out of this. But the air feels heavier every day, like it’s holding its breath. Waiting.

They lie in rows, those glass sarcophagi, each one cradling a body. The air here smells of frost and resignation. I try not to look too long at the faces behind the glass. No one moves. No one wakes. How do we know we’ll wake in the end? What if we’re not preserved but erased, our memories reduced to code and our bodies left to wither in the cold? Does Doctor know? And if he doesn’t, what good is he?

I miss laughter that echoes, hands that hold back, warmth that reminds me I’m alive. I miss the world before the ice cubes. Before we traded reality for this sterile state of mind. I miss being human.

Sometimes I wonder if this isn’t about saving the planet at all. Maybe it’s about forgetting. Forgetting who we were, what we loved, and why it mattered. And if that’s the truth, what happens to those of us who still remember?